Latest / MicGyver Media / Quo Vadis, Media? - A Jazz (or; what the porn industry tells us about the future of media)

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Quo Vadis, Media? - A Jazz (or; what the porn industry tells us about the future of media) · MicGyver Media

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Quo Vadis Media, a little jazz on the previous, and the next, Media Revolution.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Mats Michelson.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I work with strategy and business development in the media industry.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the audio version of an essay adapted from a talk I gave a couple of times
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: in early 2026.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Before we start, I'll let you in on something.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: This essay has an alternative title, which I chickened out of using.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: What the porn industry tells us about the future of media.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: More on that later.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: My aim here is to lift my gaze, think out loud,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: and paint with a broad brush around the relatively simple underlying explanations
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: behind the ongoing, and the next, upheaval facing the TV and media industry.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Part one, the previous revolution, democratized distribution.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: My most important point here is that pretty much everything we've wrestled
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: with over the past 30 years can be reduced to one picture.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't get many points for pointing out that the internet changed
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: the media industry, but let me be a bit more specific.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: The so-called digital age has done two things.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: First, information and media went from being communicated through analog signals
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: and physical products to everything being representable as bits.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the cost of distributing those bits, and thus media, has fallen dramatically.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Picture a curve showing the cost of moving data over the internet.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: From the late 90s, it falls off a cliff.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the combination of these two that has had such far-reaching consequences.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'll go through five of them.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: The first consequence is desiloing.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: When media is distributed through analog signals and physical products,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: it naturally comes with separate value chains for each type of media,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: each with its own set of players.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: But when everything can be represented and transmitted as bits it can be delivered
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: over the same infrastructure and value chains.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: The silos blur and things start to merge into each other.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: The result is that YouTube, for example, can now offer all these media types on one platform.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: The second consequence is disintermediation.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Again, analog and physical value chains have very clearly divided links.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: More or less vertically integrated traditional companies had clear roles
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: and strong barriers to entry, all the way from production to the end user.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But as tools and distribution have been digitized and democratized,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: creators have been able to take ownership of much larger parts of the value chain,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: including the relationship with the end user.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: All of it mediated or facilitated by the so-called platform companies.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The third consequence is fragmentation.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: When distribution goes from being an expensive,
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: scarce good to affordable and widely available,
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: many more voices get through and the so-called creator economy emerges.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: PWC now estimates that it accounts for 15% of total media revenue and half of the growth.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is not just an international phenomenon.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: In Norway, a quarter of all video consumption now happens on the so-called creator platforms.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if we compare the volume published on YouTube each year with Hollywood,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: the ratio is estimated to around 30,000 to 1.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: An important point here is that the YouTube volume is itself extremely fragmented.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest creators account for a vanishingly small share of the total.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth consequence is globalization.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: The internet has no borders.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to tell anyone in the industry that we're no longer competing
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: in a national championship of TV, but against big international players.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Still, it may surprise some to see how much of the consumption already happens
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: on international services.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: According to Media Vision, 75% of online video consumption in Norway now takes place
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: on global services.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And even for the oldest age group, it has passed 50%.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the fifth consequence is concentration.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: This may seem to contradict what I just said about democratized distribution,
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: but precisely because of de-siloing, disintermediation, platform economics,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: and not least globalization, the door opens to enormous economies of scale.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of power in owning the platform.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: This means that more and more value ends up with a small number of giants.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Consider this.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Meta, the smallest of the tech giants,
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: is worth more than the entire traditional media industry combined.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it has more revenue than the entire global linear TV economy.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So here we are.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty much everything we're wrestling with, cord cutting, streaming wars,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: competition from user-generated content, the clammy hand of big tech,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: is a consequence of this cocktail.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: It can all be traced back to media being representable as bits,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: and bits having become cheap to move.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then traditional barriers fall away.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: But traditional media has had one thing to lean on.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Even as the distribution moat erodes, there's been another one in reserve.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Content, or at least quality content, is bloody expensive to produce.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when the next upheaval is precisely about making content production cheaper?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Part two, the next revolution, content production.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where the internet collapsed the cost of moving bits,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: generative AI is now potentially collapsing the cost of making bits.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The cost per token, think of it as the atomic unit or the base currency
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: of AI models, is falling fast with each new generation of models.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot we don't know here, but some things we do know.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Costs are falling and adoption is fast.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than any service before it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's already having real consequences.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Roughly half of all new articles published online are now written by AI.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you might say, text is one thing, video is a whole other game.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, that's true.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But even here, things are moving at breakneck speed.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: There are only a couple of years between the days some of you may remember
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: of a hysterically distorted spaghetti-eating Will Smith and today
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: when we have models producing video that humans can't tell apart from reality.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And these are models available to the general public.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Things are happening.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: To discuss the consequences, let me give an example.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: On one side, we have Inside Out 2, one of Pixar's biggest films from 2024.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: On the other, another feature-length animated film, Where the Robots Grow,
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: from a studio called AI Motion.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's the difference?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Inside Out 2 cost $200 million to make, with around 700 people involved.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where the Robots Grow cost around $700,000, less than half a percent, with seven people.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: To be fair, I've seen parts of the AI film, and it's a solid one out of six.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: But again, we have to remember that we're at the very starting line.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of years ago, it was unthinkable that anyone other
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: than a full-scale studio could produce feature-length animation.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: You could well imagine that the most important consequence
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: of this technology will be that established players become more efficient.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: But think back to the disparity between the volume output
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: from the creator ecosystem versus Hollywood.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: If just one in a thousand of those productions gets access
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: to generative technology like this and uses it well,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: the quality output from there will still far exceed Hollywood's.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And one more point I want to make.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost never the case that new technology just makes production more efficient.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: It almost always leads to new uses as well.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: When we went from print newspapers to online news, it wasn't just a PDF of the paper.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a whole new experience.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Dynamic front pages, links, interactivity and comment sections.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: When we went from theater to film, people didn't just film a stage play.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Whole new possibilities emerged, with camera techniques, on-location shooting,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: cutting and editing.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Video streaming wasn't just a new way of distributing.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It opened up new features, tools and business models.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now, with generative AI,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: entirely new ways of consuming and interacting with video will emerge too.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what will that look like?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: To answer that, you have to look a little into the crystal ball.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Easy to say.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that predicting the future is bloody hard.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, it isn't necessary either.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: As the science fiction writer William Gibson so nicely put it, the future is already here.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not very evenly distributed.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So all you need to do is find out who consistently sits far ahead
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: on the technology adoption curve among the innovators and early adopters
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: and see what's happening there.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Part three, what the porn industry tells us about the future of media.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: When I read an article in The Economist in late 2025, I realized where to look.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just to get it out of the way, this is a deeply problematic industry.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: But as The Economist points out, you have to give it one thing.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It has been at the very front of almost every technology wave.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't take long from Gutenberg inventing the printing press
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: until smutty pamphlets were being printed and distributed.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: The porn industry was well ahead of Hollywood in the early years of home video
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: and was decisive in VHS winning over Betamax.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And streaming video over the internet?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: This industry proved that was the future before Netflix had mailed its first DVD
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: and ages before it launched a streaming service.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And now the industry is on the front line of a new revolution, generative AI.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I want to share a bit from the article,
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: because it hints at what may lie ahead for the regular media industry too.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: What it describes is that the traditional industry,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: production companies and platforms, is now being challenged on two fronts at once.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: The first front is the so-called authentic creators.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: This one is by now well established and a consequence of the previous revolution.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Here, the creator platform is OnlyFans.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Over many years it has stolen talent, if I may say so,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: and not least attention and money from the traditional players by playing
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: on authenticity, closeness and parasocial relationships.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: But then, The Economist introduces a new front.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I pulled some numbers from Google Trends on searches for generative AI porn.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ever since ChatGPT's breakthrough in 2022, they've shot through the roof.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: This includes despicable things like deepfakes and so-called nudification apps,
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: which Elon Musk's ex got into trouble for in early 2026.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it also includes what the article focused on most,
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: fully synthetic AI platforms where users themselves create, interact with,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: personalize, and shape entirely synthetic avatars and content.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: All your fantasies can come true.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Dystopian stuff.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: But The Economist also shares some numbers showing there is clearly real demand here.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: But the incumbents aren't just being squeezed from two separate fronts.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: The two fronts also reinforce each other.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: In one direction.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Faced with these AI platforms,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: which inevitably also misuse the likeness of real people,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: some performers have started licensing their likeness to the platforms
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: and earning money from it.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the other direction, creators are now benefiting from new AI capabilities.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Virtual twins are being made and AI takes care of chats, editing and much more.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: This scales and supercharges their efforts and closes the gap to the traditional players.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Part 4.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: The same picture is starting to emerge in regular media.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the whole point of bringing this up is that this industry serves as a canary
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: in the coal mine.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: It warns of what's coming.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, are we seeing signs of any of this in our industry?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Of course!
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: The big tech platforms are a little behind,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: but have now pretty much all launched their own generative AI platforms,
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: where users get the levers and the creative power.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Adoption is limited so far, and it's not certain the real demand is there.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: But again, it's early days.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the other front, the new creator economy, we've already talked about enough.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: What about the interplay between the two fronts?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Things are starting to happen here too, if not in a straight line.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: In December 2025, we learned that Disney would invest a billion dollars in OpenAI
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: and make its characters available in the Sora video tool.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Three months later, OpenAI shut down Sora and Disney pulled out.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: That says something about how early we are in all this.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a good reminder that the demand isn't proven yet.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the direction holds.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Costs are still falling, and it's probably only a matter of time
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: before children can interact with Mickey and Elsa and Bluey and the whole gang
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: on one platform or another.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in the other direction, in January,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: YouTube CEO Neil Mohan published his annual letter,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: and his most important message for 2026 was, everyone is a studio.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to give creators the best possible AI-assisted tools
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: to scale their efforts and close the quality gap to established media.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: The second barrier to entry is now crumbling.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So where does that leave the likes of us,
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: broadcasters and established editorial media in all this?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do we end up stuck in the middle?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not authentic enough compared with the creators and not advanced
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: and productive enough compared with the AI platforms?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Do we need to both learn and borrow from each of them?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: If so, what and which side should we lean towards most?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or can we fill an entirely different role?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Part five, what does this mean for editorial media?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: What is our place when the supply of content is overflowing?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: No idea!
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Anti-climax?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: But seriously, there is so much uncertainty around technology, user preferences,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: and much else, that if I had a crystal clear answer to this,
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be grossly underpaid.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what I might have is a sense of what the right question is.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is, what becomes more valuable when the supply of content becomes,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: in practice, infinite?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's not easy to answer either, but let me make a small attempt at how we,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: broadcasters and editorial media, should position ourselves.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll start with what we must not do.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: We must not try to compete on volume.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: We will never win that game.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: What we can position ourselves for is four things.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first is trust and credibility.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Information you can trust becomes a scarce good in the new reality,
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: and the ability to offer it only becomes more valuable.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: But this isn't something we can lay claim to.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's something we have to prove we deserve.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it will take a lot.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not just from journalists, at least as much from the technology side.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: The second is community and human connection.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: People like people, and the human factor is extremely important to preserve.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the reasons I think things like live sport and reality TV,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: real people in social settings with other people, are pretty future-proof stuff.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: The third is curation.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Human attention stays just as scarce.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when supply is infinite,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: it is extremely valuable to serve as a filter and to be a place
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: with a taste people can trust.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the fourth is brand and identity.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Customer relationships, identity and brand become extremely important to break
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: through the noise.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We have to become and remain an important part of people's identity.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the matter of being a destination.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: That is perhaps more a consequence of the other four.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: If we first prove that we serve concrete, valuable functions for our users,
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: then we can convince them we're a destination worth seeking out and returning
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: to again and again.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we shouldn't be Luddites.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have to be forward-leaning enough in using the opportunities new technology gives us.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But we must remember to stop when it comes too much at the expense
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: of the things I just mentioned.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find the full essay, with charts and sources, on Substack and Medium.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: It draws heavily on work by Ezra Eamon and Doug Shapiro, who are both well worth following.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Disclaimer, the views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily reflect those
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: of my employer.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: This episode was narrated using an AI version of my voice.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: The text is 100% handcrafted, but given the topic, it felt only fair to tell you.